[ndriscoll]

> single glyph variable names due to the unfortunate decision to save paper by denoting the product by juxtaposition.

Programmers tend to have this lack of fluency with written math that they completely miss: the concise names are not to save paper or make writing easier or anything like that. They're because they make the structure of expressions easier to visually identify and parse. The shapes of expressions are an incredibly important feature of the language and often contain implicit structural analogies. You need to be able to see those analogies to correctly read mathematics, and long variable names would obscure that part of the language.

I suppose it's similar to having enough fluency in a natural language to mechanically translate the words of a poem, but you can't properly read things like the metre, so you've unknowingly missed half of what the author originally wrote and lost it all in translation.